Selected poems by Sándor Petőfi

Petőfi is the greatest Hungarian poet. Petőfi is the most well-known Hungarian poet. How many times have we read and heard the above statements! However, one must be careful with "most", as more than one survey has shown that beyond a few commonplace statements, even the young and not-so-young do not really know Petőfi. The present selection would like the reader - primarily the young - to get to know Petőfi's true face without prejudice. That of the plebeian-revolutionary thinker whose bible was the history of the freedom struggles, who could formulate the most serious problems of the Algerian transformation in the simplest way, who was guided by freedom and love, who saw ordinary soldiers as greater than generals - and we could go on and on. Perhaps this also seems like a cliché: Petőfi is very relevant today, at the beginning of the 21st century, because it is precisely our task today to get to know and accept the true world of bourgeois values, while at the same time recognizing and rejecting false values. It is hoped that those who read the poems written a century and a half ago without bias will also receive help in answering the questions that have arisen recently. In this way, and only in this way, is it possible to find Petőfi's true face through his many faces, and thus he can remain alive and become alive.